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Category Archives: Taizhong

This isn’t much of a story, really. But since it talks, however vaguely, about the messy romanization situation in Taizhong and since I haven’t put up anything lately in Pinyin itself, I decided to go ahead and post it.

Just don’t expect any useful news herein, unless you’d be surprised to hear that Taizhong’s street signs are a mess.

An observant reader, Sonarchic, sent in the top two photos below, both of which were taken in Taizhong (Taichung), Taiwan. The first one is especially interesting in that what would be written zhong in Hanyu Pinyin is here written two different ways: chung and zhueng.

Here’s an older street sign.

I’ve appended two photos I took myself in Taizhong about two years ago.

The first was taken on a highway near Taizhong. Since highways are under the central government’s jurisdiction, these signs are in Tongyong Pinyin.

And here is a relatively new street sign with Taizhong itself. Note the use of Hanyu Pinyin, which, despite reports to the contrary, is not limited in Taiwan to Taipei City. I don’t know what “C1″ refers to; I certainly hope it’s not a variant of Taipei’s idiotic nicknumbering system. Note also how any mention of the road’s sections (duan) are omitted from the romanization — very bad. Moreover, it has always seemed to me that Taizhong’s street signs suffer from too much information: just look at all those numbers. That can’t be good for readability.

As most readers of this site know, Taiwan has approached romanization and signage with a sloppiness that sometimes beggars belief. Although the situation has improved somewhat this decade, many errors remain. And even where there are not errors, people still must often contend with a variety of romanization systems.

I made the list more than a year ago but put it on another website and never drew much attention to it. Now I’ve moved it here to Pinyin Info, where it may do more good.

The list, which is arranged by county and then by city, gives Chinese characters, Hanyu Pinyin (both with and without tone marks), Tongyong Pinyin (ugh!), and a commonly seen older form (usually bastardized Wade-Giles).

I have not bothered to include MPS2, because it is seen more on street signs than on maps. And, anyway, it’s on its way out. I strongly recommend using Hanyu Pinyin.

Just out of curiousity, I removed the English and numerals from the list and then compared how it would be written in Hanyu Pinyin (the international standard) vs. Tongyong Pinyin (Taiwan’s international embarassment). This revealed that 337 of 633 entries would be written differently in Hanyu Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin, giving a difference rate of 53.2 percent.